How many teasers can I submit?

Regular users can have a maximum of 2 unreviewed teasers at a time. This is to limit the number of teasers that we have to review to a reasonable level. Please take the opportunity to make your 2 teasers really good.

Editors are users of the website who have achieved a high enough score to be able to help review teasers before they are approved onto the site. Editors can submit 5 teasers per day because they have more practice with writing good teasers.

If you become a subscriber, you can also submit more teasers at a time.

Please allow the Editors sufficient time to review your teaser once it is in the Editing queue. Although all teasers are processed as quickly as possible, it does take time to review, discuss, and approve/reject which is why the time needed for each teaser review varies.

Is formatting important?

When typing into the box on the website, the web browser will automatically wrap the text to the next line. Only use the enter/return key to insert new lines where they are necessary for the formatting of the teaser.

Please do not submit teasers that rely on spaces to format letters in a graphical way. Because of the way HTML works, every viewer can have a different font, and the spacing will be different for each one. Teasers that rely on text spacing will not reproduce well for other users. Any teaser that uses ... or --- or spaces to make the puzzle will be rejected. These teasers will not be approved even if they are good teasers.

Are there any special rules for Letter Equations?

Letter Equations are well known phrases or facts where the key words have been replaced with the first letter of that word. These are in the form of an equation, which contain a number, an = sign and the rest of the obscured phrase or fact.

The number in the equation should not match the prefix of the missing word. Examples of illegal Letter Equations are: "5 babies in a quintet", "6 babies in a sextet", "7 babies in a septet" .

Letter Equations should also relate to things that are fairly common knowledge. Archaic measurements, fictional material, little known scientific minutiae or material requiring specialized knowledge may be considered unsuitable.

Trivia

Brain teasers that have an element of trivia in them are allowed in the trivia section, but teasers that are purely trivia will not be allowed. Example of pure trivia: "Who is the President of the United States?"

A teaser should be able to be solved without the necessity of research. Anything that contains specialized information or that requires specialized knowledge or research in order to solve, should be submitted in the form of a quiz in the trivia quiz section.

Are there any special rules for Cryptography Teasers?

For cryptograms, you should include the author's name of the quote if known. Random sentences are not acceptable as cryptograms. All cryptograms should be more than one sentence long. Cryptolist teasers should have four or more items in the list; all items in the list should be related in some way and should include a category. Cryptomath teasers should not be simply encoded mathematical expressions, rather they should be words or phrases that will reveal an equation when decoded.

Please include the solution key with all Cryptography teasers. In cases where a key is not necessary, please provide an encoding method.

Atbash has been used so many times, we are no longer accepting cryptography teasers that use Atbash.

For simple substitution ciphers, a letter cannot be encrypted as itself. In other words, the letter Z in the body cannot stand for the letter Z in the answer.

Are there any special rules for Rebus Teasers?

Rebuses are common phrases that have been disguised by the clever writer. A good Rebus brain teaser uses words or letters (not full sentences/storylike bodies) in interesting orientations to represent these phrases. There are several types of Rebus construction that have already been done a bunch of times on this website and will no longer be approved if they are the only thing in the Rebus:

+Putting a word or letters on another word to make "on" or "over".
+Putting a word or letters under another word to make "under".
+Putting a word or letters in another word to make "in".

Your Rebus should not rely entirely on these types of construction. It should have something else clever. Also, these are some common constructions that are confusing and difficult to read. You should avoid these:

+Using lowercase letters to create the word "lower", "little", or "small".
+Using uppercase letters to make the word "big" or "large".
+Spelling a word backwards to make the word "back".
+Spelling a word/letters up to make the word "up".
+Spelling a word/letters down to make the word "down".
+Arrows

Are there any special rules for Group Teasers?

Group Teasers rely on your ability to recognize groups of common attributes. For each of these puzzles you'll need to figure out why the words or letters are grouped as they are. Sometimes you will be asked to pick the odd-one-out or to place a new word into the correct group.

A Group Teaser should be able to be solved without the necessity of research. Anything that contains specialized information or that requires specialized knowledge or research in order to solve, should be submitted in the Trivia category of the Brain Teasers section, or in the form of a quiz in the Trivia Quiz section.

Jokes

Can I submit an Optical Illusion teaser?

Sorry, but Braingle does not currently accept submission to the Optical Illusion category for copyright and quality reasons. If you are a copyright holder of optical illusions that you would like to share with Braingle, please contact us.

Should I care about duplicating something on the website?

This website already has many teasers. Most of the teasers that get submitted to the website are duplicates. Many are exact duplicates. Duplicates will never be approved if we can catch them. Our crack team of reviewers rarely misses. If they do, any user of the site can find a duplicate and report it for 50 points. So, by submitting duplicates you may be increasing the score of other users. You do not get points for finding your own duplicate and when your duplicate is found, you lose the points that you got for that teaser. So, submitting duplicates has no positive outcome whatsoever for you. It only takes a few minutes to search the website for your teaser. Please take the time to do this.